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BOSWEll'S JOHNSON 



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AN ESSAY. ^ 

BY ^ 

,ORD MaCAULAY 



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LORD MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

OH 

Boswell's Life of Johjstsois", 

isrriteli toitf) Notes 

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LIFE OF MACAULAT. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great historian of England, was 
bom at Rothley, near Leicester, in 1800, and was named Thomas Bab- 
ington after his uncle. Macaulay 's grandfather was a Scotch minister, 
and his father, Zachary, after having spent some time in Jamaica, 
returned to England, and joined Wilberforce and Clarkson in their 
efforts to abolish slavery in the British possessions, Macaulay was 
educated at Bristol and at Cambridge, where hegained great distinction, 
and twice won medals for his poems. He was also a member of the 
Union Debating Society, a famous club where young politicians tried 
their skill in the discussion of the affairs of State. He took his degree 
of M.A. in 1825, was called to the bar in 1826, and contributed exten- 
sively to Knight's Quarterly Magazine, in which his first literary efforts 
appeared, including among others the ballads of "The Spanish Ar- 
mada " and " The Battle of Ivry." In 1825 he contributed to the Min- 
burgh Heview his celebrated article on Milton, and this was succeeded 
by numerous others on various themes, historical, political, and literary, 
which were afterward collected and published separately. 

Macaulay was a member of Parliament first for Colne, then for Leeds, 
and took part in the great discussions connected with the Reform Bill 
of 1832. In return for his services to his party, he was sent to India in 
1834 as a member of the Council, and while there wrote his famous 
essays on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. In 1839 Macaulay returned 
to England, was elected member for Edinburgh, and, during the eight 
years of his connection with that city, held successively the olfices of 
Secretary at "War and Paymaster-General of the Forces. In 1842 he gave 
to the world his spirited " Lays of Ancient Rome." In 1847he displeased 
his Edinburgh supporters, and in a pet they rejected him ; but in 1852 
they re-elected him of their own accord, and in this way endeavored to 
atone for the past. He devoted the interval between these two dates to 
his History of England, the first two volumes of which were published 
in 1848, two others making their appearance in 1855. They form a mag- 
nificent fragment of historical writing, embracing a period of little more 
than twelve years, from the accession of James II. to the Peace of Rys- 
wlck, in 1697. A fifth volume, compiled from the papers which he left 

iii 



LIP"E or MACAULAY. 



.eMod, ana bringing the -A down to t,.e dea.V, o^ WjUia™ HI. 

:r^ronrr:rtLnrar;:2r.ea . wes_. 

of J ames ii. aow -rT:^torv was no longer dry and uninviting, for 

portion of history with which he deals described than in 

This picture, in which eveij touch is co , ..grful and 

i^ bP told He had a massive head, and leatures oi a pu 

tbougM hta o«e «,an gooaaooUug,^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^_^^ ^^^^^ 

'r° M (uU aud'qua e He dressed badly, but not cheaply. His 
BtraigM full, =^"'1 sV'^re ne ^.^ ^^^_^^^^^^ ^^.^^ ^^^^.^^.^ 

clothes, though 1" Pf °". :^J^; -° 4^^ ^,„,,a i„ u,e best of society, 
iug them. 



BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

Boswell's book lias done for Johnson more than the best of 
his own books could do. The memory of other authors is kept 
alive by their works. But the memory of Johnson keeps many of 
his works alive. The old philosopher is still among us in the 
brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to 
be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with 
his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea 
in oceans. No human being who has been more than seventy 
years in the grave is so well known to us. — Macatilay, The Edin- 
burgh Review, December, 1856. 

" A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge." This it is 
that opens the whole mind, quickens every faculty of the intellect 
to do its fit work, that of knowing ; and therefore by sure con- 
sequence of vividly uttering forth. See, for example, what a small 
Boswell can do.— Carlyle, Eraser's Magazine, April, 1832. 

Dr. Johnson was a man of extraordinary powers, but Mr. Bos- 
well had qualities in their own way almost as rare. He united 
lively manners with indefatigable diligence, and the volatile curi- 
osity of a man about town with the drudgery of a chronicler. 
With a very good opinion of himself, he was quick in discerning 
and frank in applauding the excellences of others. — Mr. Croker, 
Boswell's Publisher. 

Vanity and folly by no means make up the whole mental equip- 
ment of Boswell. Nor could the most veracious fool have written 
such a dexterously artistic book : nothing has suffered in his 
hands ; he adds not one word too much, but gives us the most 
vivid dramatic pictures by a few simple but subtle strokes. This 
is not the work of memory nearly so much as of artistic produc- 
tion ; it is not photographic and realistic half so much as it is 
idealistic and creative. We have here a special literary faculty, 
and, moreover, one of the rarest. He had in him something of 
the true Shakespeare secret. — Life of Boswell, Percy Fitzgerald. 



LIFE OF BOSWELL. 

James Bos well, Esq., of Auchinleck, in Ayrshire, Scotland, 
celebrated as tlie friend and biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
was born October 29, 1740, at Edinburgh, where his father was 
one of the judges of the Court of Session, and as such was styled 
Lord Auchinleck. 

He was intended by his father for the profession of an advocate, 
and studied first at Glasgow, and afterwards at the then famous 
university of Utrecht, to which he went in 1763. When in Lon- 
don in that year he made the acquaintance of Johnson, an event of 
decisive importance for his whole subsequent life. The acquaint- 
ance was earnestly sought by himself, the desire originating in 
his strong literary tastes and his ardent admiration of Johnson's 
writings. 

He spent one winter at Utrecht, and then proceeded on a tour 
through Germany, Switzerland and Italy, and visited Corsica with 
a letter of introduction from Rousseau to Paoli, with whom he 
contracted a warm and lasting friendship. He enthusiastically 
adopted the cause of Corsican independence ; and after his return 
to Scotland published, in 1768, an Account of Corsica, with Memoirs 
of General Pasquale Di Paoli, which was speedily translated into 
several languages. 

Boswell became a member of the Faculty of Advocates in 1766, 
but never devoted himself with earnestness to the business of 
law. 

In 1773 he was admitted into the Literary Club instituted by 
Johnson, and of which Burke, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and Garrick 
were members. From this time he made it his principal business 
to note down the sayings and doings of Johnson, with whom he 
associated on most intimate terms, and whom he accompanied on 
his tour in Scotland and the Hebrides in 1773. 

3 



4 LIFE OF BOSWELL. 

Boswell was married in 1769 to a lady named Montgomery, by 
whom he had several children. Led hj his taste for London soci- 
ety he removed thither at a mature period of life, and entered at 
the English bar, but without attaining to any success in the pro- 
fession. 

After Johnson's death in 1784, Boswell employed himself in ar- 
ranging the materials which he had collected, and preparing his 
long-contemplated biography. His Journal of a lour to the Heb- 
rides appeared in 1785; his Life of Samuel Johnson, in 2 vols., in 
1791. Both have gone through many editions. Boswell has been 
emphatically styled by Macaulay "the first of biographers." His 
work is indeed full of details, but they are such as exhibit char- 
acter, and are arranged in the most interesting manner. He 
neither conceals his own faults nor those of Johnson, but presents 
a picture of which the truthfulness is too evident to be questioned; 
and Johnson is perhaps already better known by the pages of Bos- 
well than by any of his own writings. Boswell died in London, J une 
19, 1795. Besides the works already mentioned, he was the author 
of one or two minor productions of temporary interest. In De- 
ember, 1856, there was published a posthumous volume of Letters 
of James Boswell, addressed to the Eev. W. J. Temple, from the 
original MSS., in which the gay, careless character of the man 
very strongly appears. 



flu 



LORD MACAULAY'S ESSAY 

ON 

BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 



[N.B.— The introductory portion of the Essay containing a severe critique 
on Mr. Croker's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson is omitted, as it has 
nothing of permanent interest.] 

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great— a very great work. 
Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shake- 
speare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthe- 
nes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is 
the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced s 
all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to 
place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere. 

We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the 
human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many 
of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. lo 
Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he 
has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to 
his own account, or to the united testimony of all who knew 
him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson 
described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of is 



2. Homer. Who ? 

2. Shakespeare. Who ? 

3. Deuiostlienes. Who ? 

7. Kclipse is first. TJiis famous race-horse, the fleetest after Flying 
Childers, was bred by the Duke of Cumberland. His name was taken from 
the great eclipse of 1764, the year of his birth. He was never beaten. 

9 



10 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

immortality by not having been alive when the Dunciad was 
written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression 
for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that 
brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its 

5 fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some emi- 
nent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled -^pon. 
He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then 
"binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, 
but literally. He exhibited himself, at the Shakespeare Jubi- 

lolee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a 
placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. 
In his Tour he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh 
he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile 
and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, 

15 bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the 
dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a tale-bearer, 
an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London; so 
curious to know everybody who was talked about, that, Tory 
and High Churchman as he was, he maneuvered, we have been 

20 told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most 



1. When the Dunciad was written. Describes a contest for the crown 
of dullness. Three books were published by Pope in 1727; the first complete 
edition in 1729. 

2 Beauclerk. Topham B., one of the St. Alban's family, a gay and 
dissipated, but clever man, of sharp wit and courtly manners, with whom 
Dr. Johnson contracted a strange but honorable friendship. 

8. Binding it as a crnwti.—Job xxxi. 36. 

9. Shakespeare Jubilee. Held at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. For an 
account of it see Chambers' Book of Days, vol. i. p. .590. 

13. Paoli Bo.swell. In 1768 Boswell published an Account of Corsica, 
ivith a Journal of a Tour to that Maud. He was ever boring Dr. Johnson 
with descriptions of his travels, and the doctor bids him more than once 
" empty his head of Corsica." General Paoli, a close friend of Boswell, was 
proclaimed chief of Corsica in 175.5, and successfully sustained the struggle 
against the Genoese. He also reorganized the administration and govern- 
ment of the island. On the Genoese ceding Corsica to France in 1768 he 
resisted, but was beaten by the Count de Vaux. and took refuge in England. 

18. Tories. A political party in England of the reign of Charles I. and 
H., about the middle of the seventeenth century. Those who sujjported the 
king were called Tories, and the advocates of popular rights and parlia- 
mentary power over the crown were called Whigs. 

20. Thomas Paine. Born in England 1737, died 1809. Began life as a 
corsetmaker: afterwards obtained a post in the Excise; then was usher in a 
London school. In 1775 he went to America, where he gained fame and pop- 
ularity by writing in favor of the liberty of the colonies. He was appointed 
Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and sent to France to negotiate a loan, in 
which he succeeded, and on his return was welcomed with enthusiasm. 
Returning to England, he published in 1791 his Rights of Man, and in con- 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. H 

childish distinctions, that when he had been to court, he drove 
to the office where his book was printing, without changing 
his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire 
his new ruffles and sword. Such was this man, and such he 
was content and proud to be. Everything which another man s 
would have hidden, everything the publication of which would 
have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and 
clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. 

What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked ; 
how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments lo 
which came to nothing ; how at another place, on waking 
from a drunken doze, he read the Prayer-book, and took a 
hair of the dog that had bitten him ; how he went to see men 
hanged, and came away maudlin; how he added five hundred 
pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not 15 
frightened at Johnson's ugly face ; how he was frightened 
out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they 
would have quieted a child ; how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's 
one evening, and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies ; 
how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle, and with 20 
what stately contempt she put down his impertinence ; how 
Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusive- 
ness ; how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed 
and fretted at his fooleries ; all these things he proclaimed to 
all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and osten- 25 
tatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illu- 
sions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his 



sequence was prosecuted before the Court of Kiug's Bench. He fled to 
France, where he was welcomed with open arms, and chosen as a represent- 
ative in the Convention by the department of the Pas-de-Calais. He drew 
on himself the displeasure of Robespierre by voting for the banishment, and 
not the death, of The king. His name was struck off the list of members, and 
he was thrown into prison. In 1794 he took his place again in the Assembly, 
but shortly after returned to America. He is now known chiefly by his Age 
of Reason, a work in which he decries all existing religions, and advocates 
a pure Deism, 

14. Maudlin. " And think you that the Magdalen could have ever given 
us ' maudlin ' in its present contemptuous application, if the tears of peniten- 
tial weeping had been held in due honor by the world ? "—Trench, Study of 
Words. 

27. Hypochondriac. From Gr. vnoxovSpiov. the part under the xovSpo'; or 
cartilage of the breast-bone; the supposed seat of nervous affections. 



12 LIFE OP JOHNSON. 

castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a 
perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, 
to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history 
of mankind. He has used many people ill ; but assuredly he 

5 has used nobody so ill as himself. 

That such a man should have written one of the best books 
in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many 
persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, 
and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of 

lo mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly 
described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, 
and by another as a being 

"Who wrote like an ang:el, and talked like poor Poll.'' 

La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders 
15 would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But 
these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weak- 
nesses. Bos well attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If 
he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great 
writer. Without all the qualities w^hich made him the jest 

10. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). A poet and prose writer. His 
Traveller (1764) established his reputation. Of She Stoops to Conquer (1773) 
Johnson said he knew of no comedy for many years that has answered so 
much the sreat end of comedy— making: an audience merry. His Vicar of 
WukefiHd is considered the most exquisite of all romances in miniature. 

11. ''Inspired idiot." By Horace Walpole. 

13 "Who wrote like an angel," etc. Goldsmith, one evening at the 
St. James's Coffee-house, proposed that he and Garrick should each write 
epitaphs on the other. Garrick agreed, and at once produced the following; 
" Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll. 
Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll," 
Goldsmith replied by his poem Retaliation. 

14. La Fontaine. Born 1621, died 169.5. The butt of his contemporaries 
Moliere, Boileau, Racine, bv whom he was nicknamed Le bonhomme. A 
mot of Mme. de la Sabliere (La Fontaine's Mrs. Thrale) is well known: " En 
verite. raon cher La Fontaine, vous seriez bien bete, si vous n"aviez pas tant 
d'esprit." 

15. Hierocles. A late Greek author, who composed a book of witticisms, 
under the title of Philogelos. A free translation <>f the jests of Hierocles, 
with an introduction, was one of Dr. Johnson's earliest works 

17. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. This paradox 
has been admirably refuted by Carlyle in his review of Boswell's Life of 
Johnson in Preiser's Magazine, May, 1832 : '* Nay, sometimes a strange 
enough hypothesis has l^een started of him; as if it were in virtue even of 
these same bad qualities that he did his good work, as if it wei-e the very 
fact of his being among tlie worst men in the world tliat had enabled him 
to write one of the best books therein ! Falser hypothesis, we may venture 
to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by its nature negative, and can do 
nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything is by its nature good." 



\^ 

LIFE OF JOHNSON. 13 

and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the 
officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad- 
eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have 
produced so excellent a book. He was a slave proud of his 
servitude ; a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and s 
garrulity were virtues ; an unsafe companion who never 
scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest 
violation of confidence ; a man without delicacy, without 
shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting 
the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself toio 
derision ; and because he was all this, he has, in an import- 
ant department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such 
writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol, John- 
son. 

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as is 
writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his 
books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, relig- 
ion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. 
His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, 
and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. 20 
To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay 
them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretense to 
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable 
observations made by himself in the course of conversation. 
Of those observations we do not remember one which is above 25 



2. Toad-eatins:. A toad-eater was originally the assistant to a mounte- 
bank; hence by contraction toady. 

5. Paul Pry. Tlie chief character in the comedy of the same name by 
John Poole. He is one of those idle, meddling fellows who, having no em- 
ployment themselves, are perpetually interfering in other people'.s affairs. 

!2. luimeasurably surpassed sucli authors as Tacitus, etc. An ob- 
vious exaggeration. The four named, though all in a sense biographers, 
differ so entirely in their style and scope that there can be no just compari- 
son between them and Boswell Boswell's Life would be more fitly com- 
pared with such works as St. Simon's Memoires, Eckermann's Gesprdche 
mit Goethe, Pepys' Diary. Tacitus wrote the ii/e o/ ^gir/co/a ; Clarendon's 
History of the Great Rebellion is rather in the form of memoirs than regular 
history; Alfieri wi'ote a history of his own life; Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 
Life of Savage, Sir T. Broiime, and many others. 

13. Tacitus. The great Roman historian, in his " Life of Agricola." 

13. JKdward Hyde, Earl of Clareiid<ni (1G08-1674). An English histo- 
rian and statesman ; wrote " History of the Great Rebellion," which is rather 
in the form of memoirs than regular history. 

13. Alfieri. An Italian poet (1749-1803). 



14 LTFE OF JOHNSON. 

the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has prin 
many of his own letters, and in these letters he is al^ 
ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all ti. 
things which are generally considered as making a book valu- 

5 able, w^ere utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick 
observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he 
had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of them- 
selves have sufficed to make him conspicuous ; but as he was 
a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him im- 

lo mortal. 

Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are 
most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them as 
illustrations of the character of the writer. Bad in themselves, 
they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of Justice 

15 Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced 
consonants of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the most 
candid. Other men who have pretended_ to lay open their 
own hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have 
evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be 

20 then most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere. 
There is scarcely any man who would not rather accuse him- 
self of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous passions 
than proclaim all his little vanities and wild fancies. It would 
be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those 

25 of Caesar Borgia or Danton, than one who would publish a 

15. Justice Shallow. From Shake^^pHare's Merry Wives of Windsor. 

15. l>r. Cains. The French physician in the same play. 

16. Fluellen. The Welsh captain in Henry V. 

18. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). A celebrated Swiss philosopher 
and writer. His early career presents a series of bizarre adventures, absurd 
vagaries, and suiprising vicissitudes, of which he has given an extremely 
candid and unreserved narrative in his Confessions. 

18. Lord Byron. In his correspondence and diaries, which he left to be 
published by Thomas Moore. 

25. Csesar Borgia. The natural son of Roderic Borgia Cafterwards Pope, 
under the title of Alexander VI.). represented by ^lachiavelli as the model 
of a tyrant, notorious for the cruelty and perfidy he employed in subduing 
the independent towns of the Rom;igna, noless thati forhis domestic crimes 
and debaucheries. He is said to have assassinated his elder brother, and 
lived in incest with his sister, the infamous Lucretia Borgia. 

25. Danton. The foremost man during the first half of the French Rev- 
olution. He helped to establish the Revoiutionarv Tribunal. 10th March, 
1793, and the Committee of Public Safety. 6th April. 1793. Remember his 
famous " Jetons-leur en d6fi une tetede roi," and " De I'audace, de I'audace, 
toujours de I'audace." He was guillotined by Robespierre, April 5th, 1794. 



Jl i 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 15 

day-dream like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those 
weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most 
secret places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of 
friendship or of love, were precisely the .weaknesses which 
Boswell paraded before all the world. (He was perfectly s 
frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the 
tumult of his spirits prevented him from knowing when he 
made himself ridiculous. His book resembles nothing so much 
as the conversation of the inmates of the Palace of Truth. ' 

pis fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be lasting; lo 
but it is fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed marvelously 
resembles infamy. We remember no other case in which the 
world has made so great a distinction between a book and its 
author. In general the book and the author are considered 
as one. To admire the book is to admire the author. The 15 
case of Boswell is an exception, we think the only exception, 
to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting, 
instructive, eminently original : yet it has brought him noth- 
ing but contempt. All the world reads it: all the world 
delights in it : yet we do not remember ever to have read or 20 
ever to have heard any expression of respect and admiration 
for the man to whom we owe so much instruction and amuse- 
ment. \ While edition after edition of his book was coming 
forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of it, and 
hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural and 25 
reasonable. Sir Alexander saw that in proportion to the 
celebrity of the work was the degradation of the author. The 
very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have for- 
gotten their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who 



1. Alnaschar. See The Arabian Nights " History of the Barber's Fifth 
Brother," and Addison's Spectator, No. 535. 

1. Malvolio. Olivia's amorous stewa 1(1 in Shakespeare's Ttvelfth NigJit. 

9. The Palace of Truth. A tale of Madame de Genlis, which has been 
often dramatized, and within the last few years by Gilbert. It is a charmed 
palace, where every one is compelled against his will to speak the truth. 
24. Croker. Publisher of the " Life of Johnson." 

29. Like those Puritan ca8uist.s. '" Tliey not only declared that they 
fought for the king, but that the raising and maintaining soldiers for their 
own army would be an acceptable service for the king, parliament, and 
kingdom."— Clarendon. " For as we make war for the king against him- 
self," etc.— Hudibras. 



16 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

took arms by the authority of the king against his person, 
have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings. 
Mr. Croker, for example, has published two thousand five 
hundred notes on the life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever 

5 mentions the biographer whose performance he has taken such 
pains to illustrate without some expression of contempt. 

An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the 
malignity of the most malignant satirist could scarcely cut 
deeper than his thoughtless loquacity. Having himself no 

lo sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted 
that all others were equally callous. ^Ue was not ashamed to 
exhibit himself to the whole world as a common spy, a com- 
mon tattler, a humble companion without the excuse of 
poverty, and to tell a hundred stories of his own pertness and 

15 folly, and of the insults which his pertness and folly brought 
upon him^It was natural that he should show little discre- 
tion in cases in which the feelings or the honor of others 
might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such 
stories respecting persons whom he professed to love and 

20 revere. He would infallibly have made his hero as contemp- 
tible as he has made himself, had not his hero really possessed 
some moral and intellectual qualities of a very high order. 
The best proof that Johnson was really an extraordinary man 
is that his character, instead of being degraded, has, on the 

35 whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all his vices 

and weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than they ever 

were exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick. 

^^ Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and 

^^' in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to 

30 us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his 
coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's 



27. Churcliill. Born 1731, died 1764. His fame as a poet rests chiefly on 
the Rosciad, a bitter contemporary satire, in wliich Dr. Johnson figures. 
"He talked very contemptuously of Cliniciiiirs poetry, observing that ' it 
had a temporary currency only from its audacity of abuse, and being flllf-d 
with living names, and that it would sink into oblivion.' 

27. Kenrick. " His (Johnson's) Shdlcespeare was virulently attacked by 
Mr. William Kenrick, who obtained the degree of LL.D. from a Scotch Uni- 
versity, and wrote for the booksellers in a great variety of branches." 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 17 

(lance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs 
which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his 
insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his 
inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts 
as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps s 
of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputa- 
tions, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his 
puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcas- 
tic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous 
rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. lo 
Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as 
familiar to us as the objects by which we have been sur- 
rounded from childhood. But we have no minute information 
respecting those years of Johnson's life during which his 
character and his manners became immutably fixed. We is 
know him, not as he was known to the men of his own gener- 
ation, but as he was known to men whose father he might 
have been. That celebrated club of which he was the most 
distinguished member contained few persons who could re- 
member a time when his fame was not fully established and 20 
his habits completely formed. He had made himself a name 



10. Old Mr. liCvett. " An obscure practiser in physic among the lower 
people." " Ever since I was acquainted with Dr. Johnson, and many years 
before, as I have been assured by those who knew him earlier, Mr. Levett 
had an apartment in his house or his chambers, and waited upon him every 
morning through the whole course of his late and tedious breakfast."— 
Madame Piozzi, vol. i. p. 193. 

11. Mrs. William.s. " Mrs. Anna W., daughter of a very ingenious Welsh 
physician, and a woman of more than ordinary talents and literature, having 
come to London in hopes of being cured of a cataract in both her eyes, which 
afterwards ended in total blindness, was kindly received as a constant visitor 
at his house while Mrs. Johnson lived."— Boswell's Life. (1751.) 

His cat Hodge. " I shall never forget the indulgence with which he 
treated Hodge, his cat ; for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, 
lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor crea- 
ture."— i5/d. (17S3 ) 

The negro Frank. Francis Barber, his faithful servant, to whom he 
left an annuity of £70. He was born in Jamaica, and brought to England in 
1750. He entered Dr. Johnson's service in 1752, and with the exception of 
two short intervals, continued in it till his master's death. 

18. That celehrated club. The club, at first without a name, which 
after Garrick's death was called The Literary Club. Sir Joshua Reynolds 
was the first promoter, in 1764, and the original members were Sir J. Reyn- 
olds, Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, Goldsmith, Nugent, Beauclerk, Laneton, 
Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins. They met at the Turk's Head, Gerard 
Street, Soho. 



18 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

in literature while Reynolds and the Wartons were still boys. 
He was about twenty years older than Burke, Goldsmith, and 
Gerard Hamilton, about thirty years older than Gibbon, Beau- 
clerk, and Laiigton, and about forty years older than Lord 

5 Stowell, Sir William Jones, and Windham. Boswell and Mrs. 
Thrale, the two writers from whom we derive most of our 
knowledge respecting him, never saw him till long after he 
was fifty years old, till most of his great works had become 
classical, and till the pension bestowed on him by the Crown 

lo had placed him above poverty. Of those eminent men who 
were his most intimate associates towards the close of his life, 
the only one, as far as we remember, who knew him during 
the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the capital, 
w^as David Garrick ; and it does not appear that during those 

15 years David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman. 



1. Sir Joshua Reynolds a7::3-1792). The most celebrated portrait- 
painter that England has produced. He founded in 1764 with Dr. Johnson, 
nis intimate friend, the Literary Club. " Sir Joshua Reynolds is the most 
invulnerable man I know,'" said Johnson; "the man with whom if you 
should quarrel you will find the most difficulty how to abuse." 

The Wartons. Joseph, born 17'^, head master of Winchester Col- 
legre. Thomas, bum I7;!i8, author of History of Eitylish Poetry, and editor of 
Milton. 

2. Burke. See note 2, p. 28. 

3. Gerard Haniilton. Born 1728-9. Commonly known by the name of 
Single-speech Hamilton. In 1754 he was elected M.P. for Petersfield. and on 
November 13, 1755, in a debate on an address of thanks, be made his famous 
6T!)eech 

Gibbon. Bom 1737. died 1794. The History nf the Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Empire was p\iblished 177C-88. Johnson occasionally met 
Gibbon, but, as might be expected, they had little in common. 

4. Beauclerk, A contemporary of Langton at Trinity College, Oxford. 
Note 2, p. 10. 

Langton. BennetL.. of Langton, in Lincolnshire. "Langton, Sir, 
has a grant of free warren from Henry the Second, and Cardinal Stephen 
Langton. in King Johns reign, was of his family." 

5. Lord Stowell. Sir W Scott, elder brother of Lord Chancellor Eldon, 
one of the greatest of English lawyers. Born 1745. 

Sir William Jone.s. See note 4, p. 28. 

AVindham. W^illiam W., the great parliamentary orator, the friend 
of Burke. Born 1750. 

BosAvell and Mrs. Thra-le, etc. Boswell was first introduced to him 
when he was in his fifty-fifth year. To Mrs. Thrale he was first introduced 
in his fifty-seventh year. She i^ublished Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson, and letters 
to and from Dr. Jobnson by Hester Lynch Piozzi. (After Mr. Thrale's 
death she married Signor Piozzi.) "Mrs. Thrale, a bright papilionaceous 
creature, whom the elephant loved to play with, and wave to and fro with 
his trunk."— Cablyle. 

9. The pension. When he was fifty three a pension of £300 a year was 
conferred on bim by George HI., through the Earl of Bute, then Prime 
Minister. 
14. David Garrick. In 1737 he travelled to London in company with 



LIFE OF JOHNSOK. 19 

Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the 
condition of a man of letters was most miserable and degraded. 
It was a dark night between two sunny days. The age of the 
Maecenases had passed away. The age of general curiosity 
and intelligence had not arrived. The number of readers is s 
at present so great that a popular author may subsist in com- 
fort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the reigns 
of William III., of Anne, and of George I., even such men as 
Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live 
like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the lo 
deficiency of the natural demand for literature was, at the 
close of the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, more than made up by artificial encouragement, by a 
vast system of bounties and premiums. There was, perhaps, 
never a time at w^hich the rewards of literary merit were so 15 
splendid, at which men who could write well found such easy 
admittance into the most distinguished society, and to the 
highest honors of the state. The chiefs of both the great 
parties into which the kingdom was divided patronized liter- 
ature with emulous munificence. Congreve, when he had 20 
scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for his first 
comedy with places which made him independent for life. 
Smith, though his Hippolytus and Plicedra failed, would have 



Garrick, his fellow-townsman, and one of his pupils at Edial. Whilst he was 
himself earning: a bare subsistence as a literary hack, be naturally felt some 
jealousy at the brilliant and rapid success of hLs pupil. 

4. 31iecenas. A celebrated patron of literature at Rome, born about 
70 B.C. 

9. Congreve brought out his first comedy. The Old Bachelor, in 169.3. 
when he was in his twenty-fourth year, and made at once his fame and tor- 
tune. Pope dedicated to him his Iluid. and Dryden spoke of him as his suc- 
cessor and the guardian of his reputation. 

" In him all beauties of this agre we see, 
Etheredge his courtship, Southern's purity, 
The satire, wit, and strength of VVycherley." 
Dr. Johnson preferred a passage in Congreve's Mourning Bride to any in 
Shakespeare. 

Joseph Addison (1672-1719). His literary fame rests chiefly on his 
contributions to the periodical publications 'Ffie Tcitler, The Spectdtor. and 
The Gnardiiin. Dr. Johnson has said of him : " Whoever wishes to attain an 
Elnghsh style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must 
give his days and nighte to the volumes of Addison." 

23. Edmund Smith. One of Johnson's fifty poets, a Westminster 
scholar, and a man of some learning, though an indifferent poet. Phoedra 
and Hippolytus was brought out in 1707. Addison wrote the prologue, and 



20 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

been consoled with three hundred a year but for his own folly. 
Kowe was not only poet-laureate, Jjut also land-surveyor of 
the Customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to the 
Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the 

5 Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions 
of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative 
Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and 
of the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint. 
Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity 

lo and importance. Gay, who commenced life as apprentice to 
a silk mercer, became a secretary of Legation at five-and- 



Betterton and Booth both acted in it, but it fell flat. Lord Halifax accepted 
the dedication of the tra^edj'. and was prepared to reward the author with 
a place of £300 a year, but Smith lost it through his indolence in attending 
his patron. 

2. Nicholas Kowe. Born IGTS, died 1718. Of his tragedies, the best 
known are Jane Shore and Tlie Fair Penitent. He was acarefnl student of 
the Elizabethan dramatists, whom he often recalls by his tenderness and 
pathos. One character in Tlie Fair Penitent, ''the gaj^ Lothario," has 
passed into a common name. 

5. John Hughes. One of Johnson's fifty poets. Born at Marlborough, 
1677. Dr. Johnson mentions as a report that it was he who persuaded Ad- 
dison to finish his Cato. Chancellor Cowper made him secretary to the 
commission of the peace. His principal work was a tragedy, The Siege of 
Dainascus. 

6. Ambrose Philips. Born 167.5, died 1749. The author of Paatorals, 
ridiculed hy Pope, who nicknamed him Xamb;/ Fambi/; and of three trage- 
dies, the best known of which, the Distressed M:)ther, is borrowed from 
Racine's Andromaque. 

7. John Locke. Born 1632, died 1704. After sharing the fortunes and 
the fall of his patron, Shafteslmry Locke returned to England in 1688, in the 
same fleet which conveyed Queen Mary. He was appointed a member of 
the Council of Trade, in which post he mateiially aided Somers in the con- 
version of the currency.— See MAcaulay's History, vol. iv. p. 630. 

8. Newton. " The important office of Warder of the Mint, worth between 
six and seven hundred pounds a yeai*. had become a mere sinecure, and had 
been filled by a succession of fine gentlemen, who were well known at the 
hazard table of Whitehall, but who never condescended to come near the 
Tower. This office had just become vacant [March. 109.5-6], and Montague 
had obtained it for Newton. The ability, the industr3\ and the strict up- 
rightness of the great philosopher speedily produced a complete revolution 
throughout the department which was under his direction."— Macaulay's 
History, vol. iv. p. 703. 

9. George Stepney. Born 1663. died 1707. "It is reported that the 
juvenile compositions* of Stepney made gray authors blush. I know not 
whether his*poems will appear such wonders to the present age. "—Johnson's 
Lives nf the Poets. 

Matthew Prior. Born 1064. died 1721; educated at Westminster, 
and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was maintained by the gener- 
osity of Lord Dorset. His first work was the City and Country Mouse, a 
parody on Drvden's Hind and Panther, which he composed with Montague. 
10. John Gay. Born 1688. died iTSi. The nrst woik which brought him 
into notice was the Shepherd's Week, a set of seven pastorals written as a 
parody of Ambrose Philips. 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 21 

twenty. It was to a poem on the Death of Charles IL, and 
to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his in- 
troduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his 
auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquer- 
able prejudice of the queen, would have been a bishop. 5 
Oxford, with his white staff: in his hand, passed through the 
crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious 
•writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of 
stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring 
was a commissioner of the Customs and auditor of the im- lo 
prest. Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. 
Addison was secretary of state. 

This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, 
by the magnificent Dorset, who alone of all the noble versi- 
fiers in the court of Charles II. possessed talents for composi- 15 
tion which would have made him eminent without the aid of 



2. Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax. A friend and fellow-student 
of Prior, was originally educated for the church, but obtained, by the in- 
fluence of Dorset, a seat in the House of Commons. 

4. Swift. Thougli caressed and flattered by the Tory party, to whom 
he had deserted, Swift never succeeded in obtaining any other preferment 
than the deanery of St Patrick; and his failure in obtaining an Enghsh 
bishopric, on whici he had set his heart, embittered the last half of his 
life. 

7. Thomas Parnell. Born 1679, died 1717. An Irish clergyman, prin- 
cipally remembered by his poem the Hermit. His flr.st connections were 
with the Whigs, and he numbered Addison, Congreve, and Steele among 
his friends 

8. Sir Richard Steele. Born 1671. died 1729. The originator of. and, 
next to Addison, the principal contributor to the Spectdtor. " He outlived 
his places, his schemes, his wife, his income, his health, and almost every- 
thing but his kind heart "—Thackeray, Eiu/lish Humorists. 

9. Artliiir Mainwaring. Born 1668, died 1712. A powerful political 
writer and satirist. 

10. The imprest. Money advanced out of the Treasury for public works, 
etc. In law Latin "' de prse->tito." 

11. Thomas Tickell. Born 1686, died 1740. A friend of Addison, whose 
collected works he published, and a contributor to the Spectator. He was 
taken to Ireland by Addison, when the latter went over as secretary to Lord 
Sunderland. 

12. Addison. In April, 1717, Sunderland became Secretary of State, and 
made Addison his colleague His declining health obliged him to resign 
the post which he had held for less than a year. 

14. The magnificent Dorset. Charles Sackville. Earl of Dorset. "Such 
a patron of letters England had never seen. His bounty was bestowed with 
equal judgment and liberality, and was couflned to no sect or faction. Men of 
genius, estranged fj-om each other by literary jealousy or by difference of 
political opinion, joined in acknowledging his impartial kindness. The 
munificent Earl might, if such had been his wish, have been the rival of 
those of whom he was content to be the benefactor." — Macaxjlay's History^ 
vol. ii. p 321. 



22 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

a coronet. Montague owed his elevation to the favor of 
Dorset, and imitated through the whole course of his life the 
liberality to which he was himself so greatly indebted. The 
Tory leaders, Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with 

5 the chiefs of the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of 
letters. But soon after the accession of the house of Hanover 
a change took place. The supreme power passed to a man 
who cared little for poetry or eloquence. The importance of 
the House of Commons was constantly on the increase. The 

lo Government was under the necessity of bartering for Parlia- 
mentary support much of that patronage which had been 
employed in fostering literary merit ; and Walpole was by no 
means inclined to divert any part of the fund of corruption to 
purposes which he considered as idle. He had eminent talents 

15 for Government and for debate. But he had paid little atten- 
tion to books, and felt little respect for authors. One of the 
coarse jokes of his friend Sir Charles Hanbury Williams was 
far more pleasing to him than Thomson^s Seasons or Richard- 
son's Pamela. He had observed that some of the distin- 

20 guished writers whom the favor of Halifax had turned into 
statesmen had been mere encumbrances to their party, dawd- 

4. Harley and Bolingbroke. Robert Harley, created Earl of Oxford, 
and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingrbroke, both began life as Whigs, and 
both deserted to the Tories. When Marlborough fell from power, Harley 
was made a Commissioner of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
IJnder their ministry the peace of Utrecht was concluded. Soon after they 
quarreled, and Swift in vain tried to patch up the difference. Bolingbroke's 
influence prevailed, but his triumph was short lived. The death of Queen 
Anne restored the Whigs to power. Both statesmen were impeached. Bol- 
ingbroke fled, and Harley was committed to the Tower. 

To St. John Pope addressed his Essay on Man; and his Epistle, sent to 
the Earl of Oxford with ParneU's poems, is hardly less famous than the 
essay. 

12 Walpole. On the accession of George I. a new ministry was formed 
under Lord Townsend, with Sir Robert Walpole as Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer. 

17. Sir Charles Hanbiiry TVilliams. A poet and wit, one of the 
famous coterie to which Horace Walpole, Henry Fox, Lord Hervey, and Sir 
Robert Walpole belonged. 

18. Thomson's Seasons. The first part. T17j(fe?", was published in 1726, 
the complete work in 1730. Thomson dedicate.1 an early poem to Sir Robert, 
with a highly adulatory preface. Finding that no pension or sinecure fol- 
lowed, he withdrew the preface in later editions, and threw himself into the 
party of opposition. 

19. Richardson's Pamela. Richardson's first novel, published in 1741. 
Its popularity was such that five editions were exhausted in one year. 

20. Halifax. An English statesman, born 1G30, died 1695. 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 23 

lers in office and mutes in Parliament. During the whole 
course of his administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended 
a single man of genius. The best writers of the age gave all 
their support to the opposition, and contributed to excite that 
discontent which, after plunging the nation into a foolish and s 
unjust war, overthrew the minister to make room for men less 
able and equally unscrupulous. The opposition could reward 
its eulogists with little more than promises and caresses. St. 
James's would give nothing ; Leicester House had nothing to 
give. lo 

Thus at the time when Johnson commenced his literary ca- 
reer, a writer had little to hope from the patronage of power- 
ful individuals. The patronage of the public did not yet 
furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices 
paid by booksellers to authors were so low, that a man of con- 15 
siderable talents and unremitting industry could do little 
more than provide for the day which was passing over him. 
The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and 
withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of 
rich harvests was over, and the period of famine had begun. 20 
All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up 
in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like 
a scarecrow, familiar with compters and sponging-houses, and 
perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits of 



3 The best writers of the age, etc. In 1717 Lord Townsend was 
dismissed, and Lord Stanhope became First Minister. 

9. St. James's. The usual designation of the British court. So called 
from the old palace of St. James. 

Leicester House. In 1717 occurred the final breach between George 
I. and the Prince of Wales. The Prince was ordered to quit St. James's, and 
afterward resided at Leicester House. 

21 AH that is squalid aud miserable. " But the sufferings of the 
poet in other countries is nothing when compared to his distresses here ; the 
names of Spenser and Otway, Butler and Dryden. are every day mentioned 
as a national reproach : some of them lived in a state of precarious indigence, 
and others literally died of hunger."— Goldsmith's Citizen 0/ the World. 

23. Compters. Debtors' prisons. The Giltspur Street Compter existed 
within the memory of the present generation. 

Sponging-houses. '" Sponging-house, a house to which debtors are 
taken before commitment to prison, where the bailiffs sponge upon them, or 
riot at their cost."— Johnson's Dictionary. 
Compare also Goldsmith's famous description of the poet Scroggen : 
" There in a lonelv room, from bailiffs snug, 
The muse found Scroggen stretched beneath a rug." 



24 LIFE OF JOHNSON". 

the Common Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount 
Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and 
they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally 
abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense 
5 of insult equally acute. /'To lodge in a garret up four pair of 
stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to 
translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be 
hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence 
to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and 

lofrom St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's 
Church; to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a 
glass-house in December; to die in a hospital, and to be 
buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer 
who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been 

15 admitted to the sittings of the Kilcat or the Scriblerus Club, 
would have sat in Parliament, and would have been en- 
trusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had 
lived in our time, would have received from the booksellers 
several hundred pounds a year. 

20 As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk of 
life has its peculiar temptations. The literary character, as- 



1. Tlie Common Side, Mount Scoundrel. Parts of the Fleet 
Prison. Mount Scoundrel was tbe name given to Pome wretched g:arrets on 
the common feide. The Fleet Prison was abohshed in 1844, having existed 
more than two centuries. 

9. Grub .Street. " Originally the name of a street near Moorfields in 
London, much inhabited by the writers of small histories, dictionaries, and 
temporary pcems : whence any mean production is called yrubstieet.'''— 
Johnson's Dictionary. The street is now called Milton Street. 

Most of the touches in this picture are taken from Johnson's Life of S"v- 
aqe. " On a bulk in a cellar, or in a glass house among thieves and beggars, 
was to be found the author of the WiDnlcrer. the man of exalted senti- 
ments, extensive views, and curious observation." 

15. The Kiteat Club met at a mutton pie house in Shire Lane, near 
Temple Bar, kept by a Christopher Cat. Here Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, 
used once a week to entertain his clien's and friends. About the year 17i 
this gathering of wits produced a club partly literary and partly political, in 
which the great Whi? chiefs were associated with the principal Whig writers. 
Tonson built a room for the club at Barn Elms, which was furnished with 
the portraits of all the members, painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller, himself a 
member. The pictures were on a new-sized canvas adajjted to the height of 
the walls, whence the name kiteat came to be applied to a three-quarter 
length portrait. See Sjjectfitor, 2so. 9, with note by H. Morley. 

The Scriblerus Club. Founded by Swift, together with Pope, Gay, 
and Arbuthnot. The famous MiacfUanies were the joint production of tfie 
club, as were also the prolegomena and variorum notes to the Dnnciad. For a 
curious story of Swift's relation to the club see Goldsmith's Life of Parnell. 



T.IFE OF JOHNSON. ^^ 



suredly, has always had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy 
morbid sensibility. To these faults were now supemdded all 
the faults which are commonly found in men whose ivelihood 
is precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of 
severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of thes 
beggar were blended with those of the author. The prizes m 
the wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous 
than the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a 
manner that it was almost certain to be abused. After 
months of starvation and despair, a full third night or a wel - .o 
received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, 
unwashed poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those 
luxuries with the images of which his mind had been haunted 
while he was sleeping amidst the cinders, and eating potatoes 
at the Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon xs 
qualified him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the 
life of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Some- 
times bhizing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes 
Iving in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wear- 
ing paper cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes .o 
drinking champagne and tokay with Betty Careless; some- 
times standing at the window of an eating-house m Porndge 
Island, to snutf up the scent of what they could not affoid 
to taste; they knew luxury; they knew ^^f .^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^ 
never knew comfort. These men were irreclaimable. The> ^s 
looked on a regular and frugal life with the same aversion 
which an old gypsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a sta ion- 
arv abode, and for the restraint and securities of civilized 
communities. They were as untamable, as much wedded to 
their desolate freedom, as the wild ass. They could no morose 

17. savage. ^ An ^-ff^Voet Se^^^.^E^.^oF Johnson at St. John's Gato 
Boyse. " Among t^^^^^^f^^^^ffjf ngen")us productions, and not le.s 
was Samuel Boyse, well ^^^^^wn by bis ingeni i i ^^ ^^ ^ customer to 

noted for his in.prudence. J^T^^l^^^^^^^SonsDr Johnson collected a sum of 
the pawnbroker. On f'^.e ^f ^^^ese occa^i^^^^ u ^^^^^^ ^^^v.e& 

money to redeem b<s;nends clothes wmcn^^ sixpences at a time when 
^ri^esixS^JcT^aH'siruTciSe^^^^^ ^-^ ^— ^ 

^ypirria^^e island. " A mean street in London, flUed with cook-shops 
for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants. 



26 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

be broken in to the offices of social man than the unicorn 
could be trained to serve and abide by the crib. It was well 
if they did not, like beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the 
hands which ministered to their necessities. To assist them 

5 was impossible; and the most benevolent of mankind at length 
became weary of giving relief which was dissipated with the 
wildest profusion as soon as it had been received. If a sum 
was bestowed on the wretched adventurer,, such as, properly 
husbanded, might have supplied him for six months, it was 

lo instantly spent in strange freaks of sensuality, and, before 
forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was again pestering all 
his acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin of beef 
at a subterraneous cookshop. If his friends gave him an 
asylum in their houses, those houses were forthwith turned 

15 into bagnios and taverns. All order was destroyed; all busi- 
ness was suspended. The most good-natured host began to 
repent of his eagerness to serve a man of genius in distress 
when he heard his guest roaring for fresh i)unch at five o'clock 
in the morning. 

20 A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had 
been raised above poverty by the active patronage which, in 
his 3'outh, both the great political parties had extended to his 
Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed, 
to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the 

25 reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many poets 
who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson, in par- 
ticular, and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the 

1. Than the unicorn, etc.— J06 xxxix, 9,10. 

14. If liis friends gave liim an asylum. As, for instance, Lord 
Tvrconnel did to Savage. 

"20. Pope had been raised, etc. Pope's Iliad was published by subscrip- 
tion in 1720, when he was in his thirty-third year. He cleared by it more 
than £5000 : and by investing this sum in annuities, he secured his future 
life from want. 

23. YouMg. Author of Night Tlwuqhts. Began life as a hanger-on of the 
Duke of W^harton, and all his life through was an indefatigable though not 
very successful hunter for preferment. The dedications of his poems are, 
even in that age, unequaled in fulsomeness. Several of them were inscribed 
to Sir Robert W^alpole. 

27. Thoms<»n. See above, p. 22, 1. 18. 

28. David Mallet. Born 1700, died 17G5. A friend of Thomson, in con- 
junction with whom he wrote the masque of Alfred, which contains the 
famous song, Rule, Britannia," 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 27 

means of subsistence from their political friends. Kichard- 
son, like a man of sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept 
him, which his novels, admirable as they are, would scarcely 
have done. But nothing could be more deplorable than the 
state even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for s 
subsistence on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding,'^ 
and Thomson were certainly four of the most distinguished 
persons that England produced during the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It is well known that they were all four arrested for 
debt. 

Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson 
plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that time till he 
was three or four and fifty, we have little information re- 
specting him; little, we mean, compared with the full and 
accurate information which we possess respecting his proceed- is 
ings and habits towards the close of his life. He emerged at 
length from cocklofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society 
of the polished and the opulent. His fame was established. 
A pension sufficient for his wants had been conferred on him; 
and he came forth to astonish a generation with which he had 20 
almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards. 

In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; but 
he had seen them as a beggar. He now came among them as 
a companion. The demand for amusement and instruction 
had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually in- ?5 
creasing. The- price of literary labor had risen; and those 
rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth to 
associate were, for the most part, persons widely different 

]. Kicliardsoii was nearly fifty when he turned author. Till then he 
had been known only as a successful printer and bookseller. 

6. Collins. Boin 1121, died 1756. After Gray, the grreatest lyric poet 
of the eigrhteenth century. " Collins, who. while he studied to live, felt no 
evil but poverty, no sooner lived to study than his life was assailed by more 
dreadful calamities, disease and insanity."— Johnson's Lives. 

Fielding. Born 1707, died 1754. Educated at Eton, and afterwards 
at the University of Leyden, he found himself, on the death of his father. 
General Fieldinj?, almost penniless, and supported himself by writing for 
the stage. His wife brought him a considerable fortune, whicii he quickly 
dissipated; and it was not till 1749, when he was appointed a London police 
magistrate, that he was in possession of a settled income. 

22. In liis early years he had occasionally seen the jjreat, etc. By 
" his early years " Lord Macaulay means the first years of his London life. 



28 T.IYE OF JOHNSON. 

from those who had walked about with him all night in the 
streets for want of a lodging. " Burke, Robertson, the War- 
tons, Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir Wil- 
liam Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill were the most distin- 

5 guished writers of what may be called the second generation 
of the Johnsonian age. Of these men Churchill was the only 
one in whom we can trace the stronger lineaments of that 
character which, when Johnson first came up to London, was 
common among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt 

lothe pressure of severe poverty. All had been early admitted 
into the most respectable society on an equal footing. They 
were men of quite a different species from the dependents of 
Curll and Osborne. 



2. Edmund Burke. An illustrious statesman, orator, and philanthro- 
pist (1730-1797). The most arduous and form dabie undertaking of his hfe, 
the prosecution of Warren Hastings, was begun in 1786, and occupied the 
attentioti of the House for two sessions. He was a close friend of Johnson, 
who said of him: " No man of sense could meet Mr. Burke by accident under 
a gateway to avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first 
man in England." 

Robertson. Born 1721, died 1793. A Presbyterian minister, Princi- 
pal of the University of Edinburgh, and Historiographer Royal for Scotland. 
His three great works are a Hiatory of Scotland during the Reigns ofQneen 
Mary and King James VI., History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V., 
and a History of America. 

3. The Wartons. See above, page 18, note 1. 

Gray. Author of An Elegy in a Country Church-yard. Born 1716, 
died 1771. Johnson had a mean opinion of Gray's poetry. "Sir. I do not 
think Gray a first-rate poet. He has not a bold imagination, nor much 
command of words. The obscurity in which he has involved himself will not 
persuade us that he is sublime."— Boswell, i. 342. (1763.) He and Johnson 
never met. See also p. 41, note 4. 

William Mason. Born 172.5, died 1797. Mason was the intimate 
friend and biograplier of Gray, and ranked with Gray in Dr. Johnson's es- 
timation. 

Adam Smith. Born 1723, died 1790. Professor of Logic, and after- 
wards of Moral Philosophy, in the University of Glasgow. His Inquiry into 
the NatJtre avd Causes of the Wealth of ]\'ations laid the foundation of the 
science of political economy. 

Beattie. Born 178.5, died 1803. Professor of Moral Philosophy in 
Marischal College, Aberdeen. He published in 1771 his celebrated poem 
The Minstrel, which describes in the Spenserian stanza the inner life of a 
young village poet. 

4. Sir AVilliam Jones. Born 1746, died 1794. A famous Orientalist, 
who by pointing out the connection of Sanskrit and Latin and Greek laid 
the foundation of philology. 

Churchill began life as a clergyman, but was obliged to resign his 
preferment owing to his irregularities. His violent literary quarrels, his 
virulent satire, and his dissipation all mark him as belonging to the first 
rather than the last half of the eighteenth century. See above, p. 16. 

13. Curll and Osborne. Edmund Curll, an unscrupulous and piratical 
publisher, Pope's constant butt. See Duuciad, bk. ii. v. 57, seq. Osborne 
was the bookseller whom Johnson was reported to have knocked down one 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 29 

Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past 
age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub Street 
hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose abject 
misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaust- 
ible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From nature he s) 
had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution, and > 
an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier yearsji 
of his manhood had been passed had given to his demeanor, \ 
and even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling | 
to the civilized beings who were the companions of his oldio 
\^ age. The perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness 
f^ot his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by 
] long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his 
"' equally strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted 
with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his zi 
manners in society, made him, in the opinion of those with ( 
whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a com- j 
plete original. An original he was, undoubtedly, in some re- ' 
spects. But if we possessed full information concerning 
those who shared his early hardships, we should probably 20 
find that what we call his singularities of manner were for the . 
most part failings, which he had in common with the class to 
which he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park as he had been 
used to eat behind the screen at St. John's Gate, when he was 
ashamed to show his. ragged clothes. He ate as it was natural 25 
that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, 
had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have 
food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accus- 
tomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste 
pleasure with moderation. He could fast ; but when he did not 30 
fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins 

day in his shop with one cf his own foHos. See Johnson's emended version 
of the story, in BoswELL. (1742.) 

5. Tlie satirical genius of Pope. Poverty, in Pope's eyes, is the most 
unpardonable of sins, and in the Dnuciad no charge is so frequently brought 
against authors as poverty. 

23. Streatham Park. The country residence of the Thrales. 

24. St. Joliii's Gate. The ofifice of the Gentlemcm''s Magazine. During 
the first years of his life in London Johnson was a regular contributor, and 
in its pages appeared his I'eports of speeches in Parliament. 



30 LIFE OF JOHNSON". 

swelling on his forehead, and the perspiration running down 
his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank 
it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. There were, 
in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which 
5 raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and 
Boyse. The roughness and violence which he showed in so- 
ciety were to be expected from a man whose temper, not nat- 
urally gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, 
by the want of meat, of tire, and of clothes, by the importu- 

To nity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the deris- 
ion of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread 
which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are 
the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which 
makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, 

15 coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to emi- 
nence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise 
of his power, he should be " eo immitior, quia toler aver at ^''^ 
that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and hu- 
mane, his demeanor in society should be harsh and des- 

2opotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only 
sympathy, but munificent relief. But for the suffering which 
a harsh word inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity ; for 
it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. 
He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving 

75 girl from the streets. He turned his house into a place of 
refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find 

J no other asylum ; nor could all their peevishness and ingrati- 
tude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded 
vanity seemed to him ridiculous ; and he scarcely felt suffi- 

12. By that bread -nliicli is the bitterest of all footl, by those 
stairs, etc. From Dante"s Paradisu, canto xvii 56: 

" Yea. thou sbalt learn how salt his food who fares 
Upon another's bread,— how steep his path 
Who treadeth up and down another's stairs."'— Rossetti. 
Cacciaguida is foretelling to Dante his future fortunes, his exile, his perse- 
cution and his hfe of dependence at the court of the Scaligeri. 

13. That deferred hope.— Prorerb.s xiii. 12. 

17. Eo imniitior. From Tacituss ,4?«7ta/.s i. 20. Said of Ruf us, who had 
risen from the ranks to be first a centurion, then prsefect of the camp. On 
the same principle it is often said that the greatest bully is the boy who has 
heen bullied himself. 



LIFE OP JOHNSON. 31 

cient compassion even for the p.ings of wounded nffection. 
He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery that he was 
not affected by paltry vexations ; and he seemed to think that 
everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations 
as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of 5 
a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on 
the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his 
phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be 
ashamed to utter in a world so full of misery. Goldsmith 
crying because the Good-natured Man had failed, inspired lo^ 
him with no pity. Though his own health was not good, he 
detested and despised valetudinarians. Even great pecuniary 
losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, 
moved him very little. People whose hearts had been soft- 
ened by prosperity might cry, he said, for such events ; but 15 
all that could be expected of a plain man- was not to laugh. 

A person who troubled himself so little about small or sen- 
timental grievances of human life was not likely to be very 
attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse 
of society. He could not understand how a sarcasm or a rep- 20 
rimand could make any man really unhappy. ' ' My dear 
doctor," said he to Goldsmith, " what harm does it do a man 
to call him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed 

5. He Avas angry with Boswell. See Boswell. i 394. (I7G3.) 
10. Goldsmith cryinff, etc The Good-nut urcd Man was first per- 
formed at Covent Garden Theater on the *J9th of January, 1768. " It failed 
upon the stapre in some measure from its very merits, some of its comic 
scenes shocking: the perverted taste of an audience which admired the whin- 
ing, preaching, sentimental pieces which were then in fashion."— Shaw. 
•' Returning home one day from dining at the chaplain's table, Mr. Johnson 
told me that Dr. Goldsmith had given a very comical and unnecessarily 
exact recital there of his own feelings when his play was hissed; telling the 
company how he went to the Literary Club at night "and chatted gayly among 
his friends as if nothing had happened amiss; that to impress them still more 
forcibly with an idea of his magnanimity, he even sung his favorite song 
about ' an oZd woman fossed in a hlituket sevditcev tinit^sas high as the 
moon.'' ' But all this whde I was suffering horrible tortures,' said he, 'and 
verily believe that if I had put a 1 it in my mouth it would have strangled me 
on the spot, I was so excessively ill. But I made more noise than usual to 
cover all that, and so they never perceived my not eating, nor I believe at all 
imagined to tliemselves tiie anguish of my heai't; but when all -were gone ex- 
cept Johnson here, I burst out a-crying, and even swore that I would never 
write again.' ' All which, doctor,' said Johnson, amazed at his odd frankness, 
' I thought had been a secret between you and me; and I am sure I would not 
have said anything about it for the world.' "—Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes, p. 245. 
21. " My dear doctor," said he to Goldsiuith, etc. Many such mor- 



32^ LIFE OF JOHXSON. 

to Mrs. Carter, " who is the worse for being talked of tinchari« 
tably r Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in 
small things. Johnson wai? impolite, not because he wanted 
benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him 

5 than to people who had never known what it was to live for 
fouri>ence-halfpenny a day. 

The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union 
of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by 
the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost as high 

lo as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell ; if by the worst 
parts of his mind, we should place him even below Boswell 
himself. Where he was not under the influence of some 
strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which pre- 
vented him from lx)ldly and fairly investigating a subject, he 

15 was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to 
scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. Xo man was 
less likely to be imposed uix)n by fallacies in argument or by 
exaggerated statements of fact. But if, while he was beating 
down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish 

23 prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well-managed 
nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchant- 
ment. Hls mind dwindled away under the spell from gigan- 
tic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately 
been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much 

25 astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the 
fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, 
whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and 
whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract 



tifications arose in the course of their intituacy. to be sure, but few more 
laughable than when the newspapers bad tackt^l them [Goldsmith and John- 
son 1 together as the i)edant and hi« flatterer in Lc>r>r's Latxir Lest. Dr. 
Goldsmith came to hit; friend, fretting and foaming, and vowing Tengeance 
atrainst the printer, etc.. till Mr John.>-on. tired of tte bustle, and desirous to 
tiink of something else cried out at Uist. ■"Wliy. what wouldst thou have, 
dear doctor ? WTio the plague is hurt with all this nonsense* and how is a 
man the worse, I wonder, in his health, purse, or charact-f'r, for being called 
H"l-<f'rursf^' •' I do not know < replies the other i how 5 ou mav relish being 
called Holofeniex. but Ido noi like at least to play Goodman DtLU/'—Fiozzi's 
Art<^cdott^. p. 180. 

26. The fisherman. See The Arabian Nights, " The History of the 
Fisherman." 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 33 

himself to the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there 
the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon. 

Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity 
the evidence for all stories which were merely odd. But when 
they were not only odd but miraculous, his severity relaxed. 5 
He began to be credulous precisely at the point where the 
most credulous people begin to be sceptical. It is curious 
to observe, both in his writings and in his conversation, the 
contrast between the disdainful manner in which he rejects 
unauthenticated anecdotes, even when they are consistent 10 
with the general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in 
which he mentions the wildest stories relating to the invisible 
world. A man who told him of a water spout or a meteoric 
stone generally had the lie direct given him for his pains. A 
man who told him of a prediction or a dream wonderfully 15 
accomplished was sure of a courteous hearing. " Johnson," 
observed Hogarth, "like king David, says in his haste that 
all men are liars." "His incredulity," says Mrs. Thrale, 
" amounted almost to disease." She tells us how he browbeat 
a gentleman who gave him an account of a hurricane in the 20 
West Indies, and a poor Quaker who related some strange 
circumstance about the red-hot balls fired at the siege of Gib- 
raltar. "It is not so. It cannot be true. Don't tell that 
story again. You cannot think how poor a figure you make 
in telling it." He once said, half-jestingly, we suppose, that 25 
for six months he refused to credit the fact of the earthquake 
at Lisbon, and that he still believed the extent of the ca- 
lamity to be greatly exaggerated. Yet he related with a 



17. Hogarth. A celebrated painter ("1697-1764). 

20 All account of a hurricane, etc. The reason he grave Mrs. Thrale 
for his increduUty about the hurricane is characteristic: " 'Tis so easy for a 
man to fill his mouth with a wonder, and run about telliogr the lie before it can 
be detected, that I have no heart to believe hurricanes easily raised by the 
first inventor, and blown afterwards by tuousauds more.'— Piozzi's Aitec- 
dotes, p. 140 

22. The siege of Gibraltar. The story is thus introduced by Madame 
Piozzi: ■' Two Rfntlemen I perfectly well remember dining with us at Streat- 
hamin the summer of 1782. when Elliott's brave defense of Gibraltar was a 
subject of common discourse."— Pa^e 138. 

27. Th« earthquake at Lisbon. Occurred in 1755. See Piozzi, p. 141. 



34 LTFE OF JOHNSON. 

grave face how old Mr. Cave of St. John's Gate saw a ghost, 
and how this ghost was something of a shadowy being. He 
went himself on a ghost-hunt to Cock Lane, and was angry 
with John Wesley for not following up another scent of the 

5 same kind with proper spirit and perseverance. He rejects 
the Celtic genealogies and poems without the least hesitation ; 
yet he declares himself willing to believe the stories of the 
second-sight. If he had examined the claims of the Highland 
seers with half the severity with which he sifted the evidence 

lofor the genuineness of Fingal, he would, we suspect, have 
come away from Scotland with a mind fully made up. In his 
Lives of the Poets we find that he is unwilling to give credit 
to the accounts of Lord Roscommon's early proficiency in his 
studies ; but he tells with great solemnity an absurd romance 



1. Mr. Cave . . . saw a ghost. "Talking of ghosts, he said he knew 
one friend who was an honest man and a sensible man, who told him he had 
seen a ghost —old Mr. Edward Cave, the prmter at St. John's Gate. He said 
Mr. Cave did not like to talk of it. and seemed to be in great horror whenever 
it was mentioned. Boswell: ' Pray, sir. what did he say was the appear- 
ance?' Johnson: 'Why, sir, something of a shadowy being."— Boswell, 
ii. 180. (1772 ) 

3. A ghost-hunt to Cock L-aiie. " Churchill, in his poem entitled 
The Ghost, availed himself of the absurd credulity imputed to Johnson, and 
drew a caricature of him under the name of ' Poniposo.' representing him as 
one of the believers of the story of a ghost in Cock Lane, which in the year 
1762 had gained very general credit in London."— Boswell, i. »45. (1763.) 

4. John Wesley. '" Of John W'esley he said. ' He can talk well on any 
subject.' Boswell: ' Pray, sir, what has he made of his story of a ghost ? ' 
Johnson: ' Why, sir, he believes it. but not on sufficient authority. He did 
not take time enough to examine the girl. It was at Newcastle, where the 
ghost was said to have appeared to a young woman several times, men- 
tioning something about the right to an old house, advising application to be 
made to an attorney, which was done; and at the same time saying the at- 
torney would do nothin;^, which proved to be the fact. "This (says John) 
is a proof that a ghost knows our thoughts." Now ( laughing) it is not neces- 
sary to know our thoughts to tell that an attorney will sometimes do nothing. 
Charles Wesley, who is a more stationary man, does not believe the story. I 
am sorry that John did not take more pains to inquire into the evidence for 
it.' Miss Seward (with an incredulous smile): ' What, sir! about a ghost ? ' 
Johnson (with solemn vehemence): ' Yes, madam. This is a question which, 
after five thousand years, is yet undecided; a question, whether in theology 
or philosophy, one of the most important that can come before the human 
understanding.' "—Boswell. iii. 299. 

10. Fingal. An epic poem in six books, by Macpberson, professing to be 
a translation from the Gatrlic. 

13. Dillon, afterward Earl of Roscommon, was born during the lieutenancy 
of his uncle. Lord Strafford, by whom he was sent to Caen when Strafford was 
threatened with impeachment. " That he was sent to Caen is certain; that 
he was a great scholar may be doubted."— Johnson, Lives, Earl of Roscom- 
mon. 

14. An absurd romance, etc. At Caen he [Lord| Roscommon] is said 
to have had some preternatural intelligence of his father's death. 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 35 

about some intelligence preternaturally inapressed on the mind 
of that nobleman. He avows himself to be in great doubt 
about the truth of the story, and ends by warning his readers • 
not wholly to slight such impressions. 

Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of ^ 
a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough 
the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own. When 
he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a per- 
son who had really obtained an insight into the divine philoso- 
phy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity lo 
as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote the hap- 
piness and to elevate the moral nature of man. The horror 
which the sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-por- 
ridge, mince-pies, and dancing bears, excited his contempt. 
To the arguments urged by some very worthy people against 15 
showy dress he replied with admirable sense and spirit, "Let 
us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the lace 
off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls 
and tongues. Alas ! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in 
a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray ao 
one." Yet he was himself under the tj^anny of scruples as 
unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his 
zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths 
altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity. 
He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once com- 25 
mitted the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scot- 
land he thought it his duty to pass several months without 
Joining in public worship, solely because the ministers of the 
kirk had not been ordained by bishops. His mode of esti- 
mating the piety of his neighbors was somewhat singular. 30 
" Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man. I am 



22. Hudibras or Ralplio. The principal characters in Samuel Butler's 
famous burlesque. Sir Hudibras, a caricature of the Presbyterian, is a 
justice of the peace, who sallies forth on a crusade against the amusements 
of the people Ralph, his clerk, represents the Independent. 

31. Campbell is a good man, etc. Boswell, i. 355. (1763). Dr. John 
Campbell, a political and biographical writer. He says of him : " He is a very 
inquisitive and a very able man, and a man of good religious principles, 



36 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many 
years ; but he never passes a church without pulling off his 
hat. This shows he has good principles." Spain and Sicily 
must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled 

5 assassins. Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who 
named all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked in 
the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an 
unprincipled villain, whose religious mummeries only aggra- 
vated his guilt. But a man who took off his hat when he 

lo passed a church episcopally consecrated must be a good man, 
a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could easily 
see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waist- 
coat as sinful deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God 
and of the ends of revelation. But with what a storm of in- 

15 vective he would have overwhelmed any man who had blam.ed 
him for celebrating the close of Lent with sugarless tea and 
butterless buns ! 

Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the cant of patriot- 
ism. Nobody saw more clearly the error of those who rep- 

20 resented liberty not as a means, but as an end, and who 
proposed to themselves, as the object of their pursuit, the 
prosperity of the state as distinct from the prosperity of the 
individuals who compose the state. His calm and settled 
opinion seems to have been that forms of government have 

25 little or no influence on the happiness of society. This 

opinion, erroneous as it is, ought at least to have preserved 

. him from all intemperance on political questions. It did not, 

however, preserve him from the lowest, fiercest, and most 

absurd extravagances of party spirit, from rants which, in 

30 everything but the diction, resembled those of Squire Western. 
He was, as a politician, half ice and half fire. On the side of 
his intellect he was a mere pococurante, far too ai'athetic 
about public affairs, far too skeptical as to the good or evil 

though I am afraid he has been defieient in practice. Campbell is radically 
right, and we may hope that in time there will be good practice." 

5. Koundliead. Another name for the Puritans. Cromwell's partj' in 
the Revolution against King Charles I. 

30. Squire Western. The foul-mouthed, boorish country squire in Tom 
Jones. 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 37 

tendency of any form of polity. His passions, on the con- 
trary, were violent even to slaying against all who leaned to 
Whiggish principles. The well-known lines which he inserted 
in Goldsmith's Traveller express what seems to have been his 
deliberate judgment: s 

" How small, of all that human hearts endure, 
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!" 

He had previously put expressions very similar into the mouth 
of Rasselas. It is amusing to contrast these passages with 
the torrents of raving abuse which he poured forth against lo 
the Long Parliament and the American Congress. In one of 
the conversations reported by Boswell this inconsistency dis- 
plays itself in the most ludicrous manner. 

"Sir Adam Ferguson," says Boswell, "suggested that 
luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. 15 
Johnson : ' Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a 
guinea to live under one form of government rather than 
another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. 
Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private 
man. What Frenchman is prevented passing his life as he 20 
pleases ? ' Sir Adam : ' But, sir, in the British Constitution it 
is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as 
to preserve a balance against the crown.' Johnson: 'Sir, I 
perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy 
of the power of the crown? The crown has not power 25 
enough.' " 

One of the old philosophers. Lord Bacon tells us, used to 
say that life and death were just the same to him. " Why 
then," said an objector, "do you not kill yourself?" The 
philosopher answered, "Because it is just the same." If the 30 
difference between two forms of government be not worth 
half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler 



4. Goldsniitli's Traveller. The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Snciety, 
was published in 1764. The concluding ten lines of the poem, exceiDtthe last 
couplet but one, were written by Johnson. 

9. Kasselas. A novel of Johnson's, iniblished 1759, which he wrote in 
the nights of one week, to defray the expenses of liis mother's funeral. 
14. Sir Adam Ferguson, etc. See Boswell, ii. 172. (1772.) 



38 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

than Toryism, or how the crown can have too little power. 
If private men suffer nothing from political abuses, zeal for 
liberty is doubtless ridiculous. But zeal for monarchy must 
be equally so. No person could have been more quick- 

5 sighted than Johnson to such a contradiction as this in the 
logic of an antagonist. 

The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, in his 
own time, regarded with superstitious veneration, and, in our 
time, are generally treated with indiscriminate contempt. 

loThey are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understand- 
ing. The mind of the critic was hedged round by an unin- 
terrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his 
narrow limits he displayed a vigor and an activity which 
ought to have enabled him to clear the barrier that confined 

15 him. 

How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises 
so ably should assume his premises so foolishly is one of the 
great mysteries of human nature. The same inconsistency 
may be observed in the schoolmen of the middle ages. Those 

20 writers show so much acuteness and force of mind in arguing 
on their wretched data, that a modern reader is perpetually 
at a loss to comprehend how such minds came by such data. 
Not a flaw in the superstructure of the theory which they are 
rearing escapes their vigilance. Yet they are blind to the 

25 obvious unsoundness of the foundation. It is the same with 
some eminent lawyers. Their legal arguments are intellectual 
prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies and the 
most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary 
science being once admitted, the statute-book and the reports 

30 being once assumed as the foundations of jurisprudence, these 
men must be allowed to be perfect masters of logic. But if a 
question arises as to the postulates on which their whole 

19. Sohoolmen. Philosophical divines of the middle asres especially from, 
the 11th century to the Reformation, who spent much time on points of nice 
and abstract speculation. They acknowledged Aristotle as their master. 
They were so called because they taught in the mediaeval universities and 
schools of divinitj^ Against M^icaulays sweeping condemnation of them we 
may at least quote Liebnitz's apology: 

"H y a encore de Tor dans ces scories." 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 39 

system rests, if they are called upon to vindicate the funda- 
mental maxims of that system which they have passed their 
lives in studying, these very men often talk the language of 
savages or of children. Those who have listened to a man of 
this class in his own court, and who have witnessed the skill s 
with w^hich he analyzes and digests a vast mass of evidence, 
or reconciles a crowd of precedents which at first sight seem 
contradictory, scarcely know him again wiien, a few hours 
later, they hear him speaking on the other side of Westminster 
Hall in his capacity of legislator. They can scarcely believe lo 
that the paltry quirks which are faintly heard through a 
storm of coughing, and which cannot impose on the plainest 
country gentleman, can proceed from the same sharp and 
vigorous intellect which had excited their admiration under 
the same roof, and on the same day. 15 

Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a j 
legislator.} He never examined foundations where a point 
was already ruled. His whole code of criticism rested on 
pure assumption, for which he sometimes quoted a precedent 
or an authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason 20 
drawn from the nature of things. He took it for granted 
that the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, 
which he had been accustomed to hear praised from his child- 
hood, and which he had himself written with success, was the 
best kind of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeat- 25 
edly laid it down as an undeniable proposition that during 
the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the earlier 
part of the eighteenth, English poetry had been in a constant 
progress of improvement. Waller, Denham, Dry den, and 
Pope had been, according to him, the great reformers. He 30 
judged of all works of the imagination by the standard estab- 
lished among his own contemporaries. Though he allowed 



9. Westminster Hall. The law courts were established here in 1224. 
29. Waller, JJenham, Drydeii, Pope. "Waller certainly very much 
excelled in smoothness most of the writers who were living: wlien his poetry 
commenced. . . . The critical decision has given the praise of strength to 
Denham, and of sweetness to Waller." 



'^^ LIFi: OF JOHNSON. 



Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to 
have thought the jE7ieid a greater poem than the Iliad 
Indeed, he well might have thought so; for he preferred 
Pope's Iliad to Homer's. He pronounced that, after Hoole's 

5 translation of Tasso, Fairfax's would hardly be reprinted. 
He could see no merit in our fine old English ballads, and 
always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Percy's 
fondness for them. Of all the great original works which 
appeared during his time, Richardson's novels alone excited 

to his admiration. (He could see little or no merit in Tom Jones, 
in Gulliver's T ravels, or in Tristram ^handy^) To Thomson'^ 

1. Thougli he allowed Homer, etc. " He said the disDute a«! to th*. 
comparative excellence of Homer or Virjjil was iSccurate ' We must Von 
sider (said he) whether Homer was not the greatesFpoet though vTriiln.nv 
have produced the finest poem.' '-Boswell. iii 197 (1777 ) ^ ^ 

for th^ltaLmTnr''ln';r> y"^? i" Homer's. I know 'if no authority 
^?J..i-V ^/'*'[*^™^"t. in hih Life of Fope Johnson says: " Had he eiven the 
world only his version, the name of poet must have been alowedWm Tf 
the writer of the Iliad were to class his successors, hrwoudasttn^verv 

D. Attei Hoole s translation etc. Edward Fairfax Duhlkhpd in ifim 
a translation of Tasso's J«r„»,i„„ Delivered, under the fllVe of GodfrUS? 

S'S;;r^r,{,efeaStr.i;e ^uif.^ '■-""^'-^ "^ ^'^ - "^ 

teirfa'^fu^r'tTrnkSS-: '"""^"'^ ^"""^ "^ the'^i.^S^S 
" I put my hat upon my head, 
And walked into the Strand; 
And there I met another man, 
Whose hat was in his hand.'" 
But it is only fair to quote at the same time the letter to Boswell in which he 
Sie.^^^;^^^'''''' *^ ^'^''-^ ^- ^'-^ ^-ce and splenSo^-^f h'is 
■ ul^-,^^ 9**?^^^ see little or no merit in Tom Joiies, bv Fieldin?. 
Fielding being mentioned, Johnson exclaimed, • He was a hlockhead ' and 
upon my expressing my astonisJiment at so strange an asserdon he safd 
\\ hat I mean by his bemg a blockhead is that he was a barren rascal ' 
Boswell: * Will you not allow, sir, that he draws very natural net me'loV 
human life ? ' Johnson: ' Why, sir. it is of verv lowM fe Rir-hLf-rW i 

to say that had he not known I'ho i^iekiing ^S ^rshouid favelel evedle 
^as an ostler Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one leUer of 
Richardson s than in all Tom Jones. ' ' -Boswell. On anothe? occasion he 
cSS ISrSl^^"^ '^' ''''^' ^^^ ^^"-^ ^' ^^f^' whillF^^rwal 

new and strange that it filled the reader with a minjded enfo (^,0^^^^^ 
ment and amazement. It was received witli such afidityTharthe PHce of 
the first edition was raised before the second could be made- it was -ead bv 
the high and the ow. the learned and the illiterate. Criticism was for a 

^J^i^^;^:^;^:::;^^:^j^;^r^ -- -pp^^e^^ toTK.ori^£[e„^ 

Sterne's Tristram Shandy "Johnson: 'Nothing odd will do long. 



LIFE OP JOHNSON. 41 

Castle of Indolence he vouchsafed only a line of cold com- 
mendation, of commendation much colder than what he has 
bestowed on the creation of that portentous bore, Sir Richard 
Blackmore. Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. 
Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for s 
the trash of Macpherson was, indeed, just ; but it was, we 
suspect, just by chance. He despised the Fingal for the 
very reason which led many men of genius to admire it. He 
despised it, not because it was essentially commonplace, but 
because it had a superficial air of originality. lo 

He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions 
fashioned on his own principles. But when a deeper phi- 
losophy was required, when he undertook to pronounce judg- 
ment on the works of those great minds which " yield homage 
only to eternal laws," his failure was ignominious. He 15 
criticised Pope's epitaphs excellently. But his observations 
on Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us for the 
most part as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer 



Sterne's Tristram Shandy did not last/ "— Boswell, ii. 448. (1776.) Elsewhere 
he talks of the author as " the man Sterne." 

1. Thomson's Castle of Indolence. All Johnson says of it in his Life 
0/ r/io»7tson is as follows: "The last piece that he lived to publish was the 
Castle of Indolence, which was many years under his hand, but was at last 
finished with great accuracy. The first canto opens a scene of lazy luxury 
that fills the imagination:" 

4. Sir Kicliard Blackmore. Born 1658. died 1729. He received the 
honor of knighthood from King William, not for his verses, but his physic. 
Johnson says of his poem, The Creation: "This poem, if he had written 
nothing else, would have transmitted him to posterity among the first 
favorites of the Enjjlish nmse. " 

Gray. " He attacked Gray, calling him ' a dull fellow.' Bosweli,: ' I 
understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely 
he was not dull in poetry.' Johnson: ' Sir. he was dull in company, dull in 
his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many 
people think him great. He was a mechanical poet." No, sir, there are but 
two good stanzas in Gray's poetry, which are in his Elegy in a Country 
Churchyard.' He then repeated the stanza— 

' For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,' " etc. 

— BoswELL, ii. 329. (1775.) 
So too in his Life of Gray, the Elegy is the only one of Gray's poems which 
he commends. 

5. Churchill. See above, p. 28. 

16. Pope's Epitaphs. In an appendix to his Life of Pope. 

17. Shakespeare's plays. In his introduction to Shakespeare. 
Milton's poems. Johnson's judgment on L^/c/r/a.s—" The diction is 

harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing "—has passed into 
a proverb as an example of mistaken criticism. De Quincey. in his Miscel- 
lanies, has an eloquent vindication of Milton against Johnson's strictures. 

18. Thomas Rymer (1640-1714). Historiographer-royal in 1692. He 



42 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that ever 
lived. 

Some of Johnson's whims on literary subjects can be com- 
pared only to that strange nervous feeling which made him 

5 uneasy if he had not touched every post between the Mitre 
tavern and his own lodgings. His preference of Latin 
epitaphs to English epitaphs is an instance. An Englisii 
epitaph, he said, would disgrace Smollett. He declared that 
he would not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey with an 

lo English epitaph on Goldsmith. What reason there can be for 
celebrating a British writer in Latin, which there was not for 
covering the Roman arches of triumph with Greek inscrip- 
tions, or for commemorating the deeds of the heroes of Ther 
mopylae in Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to* 

15 imagine. 

On men and manners, at least on the men and manners of 
a particular place and a particular age, Johnson had certainly 
looked with a most observant and discriminating eye. His 
remarks on the education of children, on marriage, on the 

20 economy of families, on the rules of society, are always strik- 
ing, and generally sound. In his writings, indeed, the knowl- 
edge of life which he possessed in an eminent degree is very 
imperfectly exhibited. Like those unfortunate chiefs of the 
middle ages who were suffocated by their own chain-mail and 

25 cloth of gold, his maxims perish under that load of words 
which was designed for their ornament and their defense. 
But it is clear from the remains of his conversations, that he 



was a poor critic, but an industrious compiler. Pope, unlike Macaulay, re- 
garded him as •* on the whole one of the best critics we have ever had." 

8. Smollett. Born 1721, died 1771. The great naval novelist, the author 
of Roderick Random, Pcteorine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker. Like Field- 
ing:, he died and was buried in a foreigrn land. 

10. An Kngflisli epitaph on (ioldsniith. See the story of the round- 
robin asking Johnson to re-write the epitaph in English, of which Sir Jushua 
Reynolds was the bearer. '• He desired Sir Joshua to tell the gentlemen that 
he would alter the epitaph in any manner they pleased as to the sense of it; 
but he wonid never consent to dis(ji(ic-^ thf avails of iVestniinster Abbey 
mitii an English inscription.'' — Boswell. Non obstante Lord Macaulay, 
something may be said in favor of Latin epitaphs. For instance, is it pos- 
sible m English to reproduce the brevity and pointedness of this sentence 
from Goldsmith's epitaph: " Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetiglt, nullum 
quod tetigit non ornavit "? 



A 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 43 

had more of that homely wisdom which nothing but experi- 
ence and observation can give than any writer since the time 
of Swift. If he had been content to write as lie talked, he 
might have left books on the practical art of living superior 
to the Directions to Servants. 3 

Yet even his remarks on society, like his remarks on litera- 
ture, indicate a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness 
as for strength. He was no master of the great science of 
human nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but the 
species Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant 10 
with all the forms of life and all the shades of moral and intel- 
lectual character which were to be seen from Islington to the 
Thames, and from Hyde Park corner to Mile-end green. But 
his philosophy stopped at the first turnpike- gate. Of the rural 
life of England he knew nothing ; and he took it for granted 15 
that everybody who lived in the country was either stupid 
or miserable. "/Country gentlemen," said he, "must be 
unhappy ; for they have not enough to keep their lives in 
motion ;" as if all those peculiar habits and associations 
which made Fleet Street and Charing Cross the finest views 20 
in the world to himself had been essential parts of human 
nature. Of remote countries and past times he talked with 
wild and ignorant presumption. "The Athenians of the age 
of Demosthenes," he said to Mrs. Thrale, " were a people of 
brutes, a barbarous people." In conversation with Sir Adam 25 
Ferguson he used similar language. " The boasted Athenians," 
he said, "were barbarians. The mass of every people must 
be barbarous where there is no printing." The fact was this : 
he saw that a Londoner who could not read, was a very stupid 
and brutal fellow : he saw that great refinement of taste and 30 
activity of intellect were rarely found in a Londoner who had 
not read much ; and, because it was by means of books that 
people acquired almost all their knowledge in the society 
with which he was acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of 

5. Directions to servants. A set of ironical rules by which the faults, 
tricks, blunders, and various knaveries of domestic servants are pointed out. 
Eg., " Wear your lady's smock when she has thrown it off. It will do you 
credit, save your own linen, and be not a pin the worse." 



44 LIFE OP JOHNSON. 

the strongest and clearest evidence, that the human mind can 
be cultivated by means of books alone. An Athenian citizen 
might possess very few volumes ; and the largest library to 
which he had access might be much less valuable than John- 

5 son's book-case in Bolt Court. But the Athenian might pass 
every morning in conversation with Socrates, and might hear 
Pericles speak four or five times every month. He saw the 
plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes : he walked amidst the 
friezes of Phidias and the paintings of Zeuxis : he knew by 

lo heart the choruses of ^Eschylus : he heard the rhapsodist at 
the comer of the street reciting the Shield of Achilles or the 
Death of Argus : he was a legislator conversant with high 
questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a soldier 
trained under a liberal and generous discipline : he was a 

15 judge, compelled every day to weigh the effect of opposite 
arguments. These things were in themselves an education, 
an education eminently fitted, not, indeed, to form exact or 
profound thinkers, but to give quickness to the perceptions, 
delicacy to the taste, fluency to the expression, and politeness 

20 to the manners. All this was overlooked, (in Athenian who 
did not improve his mind by reading was, in Johnson's opin- 
ion, much such a person as a Cockney who made his mark, 
much such a person as black Frank before he went to school, 
and far inferior to a parish clerk or a printer's devil. 

5. Bolt Court. Between Fleet Street and Holborn. 

7. Pericles. The greatest of Athenian statesmen; d 4'29. 

8. Sophocles. A Greek tragic poet; b. 495 b c. ; d. 405 b.c. 
Aristophanes. The most celebrated comic poet of Greece. Born 

441 B c. ; died about 380 b.c. 

9. The friezes of Phidias (one of the greatest sculptors of the world. 
Born about 485 B.C., died about 432 b.c ). In particular those of the Parthe- 
non, which may be still seen in the British Museum. 

The paintiiijjs of Zeuxis (a celebrated Greek painter. Born 450 
B.C.). Every one knows the story of the grapes. Besides this picture, his 
most famous were the "Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpent" and the 
"Female Hippocentaur." 

10. ./Eschylus. The first of the tragic poets of Greece : b. 525 b.c , d. 456 e.g. 
The rhapsodist. From pdnTixj and oJSr}, properly one who stitched 

songs together, especially of those who sang the lays of Homer In the later 
times of Greek history they were a low and ignorant class of ballad-mon- 
gers, only acceptable to the common people. Hence the English use of the 
word. 

11. The shield of Achilles. From Homer's Iliad. 

12. The death of Argus. From Homer's Orii/asei/. 
22. Cockney. A term of contempt among Londoners. 

^. Black Frank, hefore he went to school. See above, p. 17. John- 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 49 

our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is 
almost superfluous to point them out. It is well known that 
he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong, 
plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the 
roots lie in the inmost depths of our language : and that he ^ 
felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own 
speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and 
Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalized, 
must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with 
the king's English. ,His constant practice of padding out a ^° 
sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the 
bust of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of expression, con- 
stantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas 
expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his harsh 
inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy ^s 
inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the 
expression of our great old writers, all these peculiarities have 
been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, 
till the public has become sick of the subject.") 

(Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If 20 
you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would 
make the little fishes talk like whales?^ No man surely ever 



tains have ere now produced muscipular abortions, and he who compares 
incipient grandeur with final decay is reminded of the hawker who perambu- 
lates the streets of Constantinople, exclaiming, ' In the name of the Prophet 
Figs.' " On the other hand, we may remark that many of Johnson's words 
which were ridiculed as newfangled and " long-tailed " have since passed 
into e very-day language. For instance. Dr. Barrowes, in his Essay on the 
Style of Johnson (1787), abuses him for using "resuscitation," "fatuity," 
"asinine." "narcotic," "sensory," " panoply," "cremation," " horticulture." 
4. Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French. Anglo Saxon, or, as it ought 
perhaps more correctly to be called. Early English, forms the whole scaf- 
folding of the language. From it we derive our grammar, inflections, and 
terminations, the pronouns and prepositions, and most of the names for 
common objects. By Norman-French words are meant the words adopted 
into English from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. The Normans, by 
origin a Scandinavian race, adopted the French language after their settle- 
ment in Neustria. 

If we count the words in Dr. Johnson's Preface to Dictionary, we shall find 
that 72 per cent are Anglo-Saxon, and 28 Latin or Greek; from which fact we 
may infer that, " even in those authors whose total vocabulary embraces the 
greatest number of Latin and other foreign vocables, the Anglo-Saxon still 
largely predominates."— Marsh, Lectures on the English Language. 

20. Goldsmitli said to liim. See Boswell, ii. p. 233. (1773.) 



50 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

had so little talent for personation as Johnsofi. Whether 
he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or 
an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, 
he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His 

5 speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's euphuistie eloquence, be- 
trayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea 
talk as finely as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. 
The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house 
of her relations in such terms as these: "I was surprised, 

lo after the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the 
leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, 
and, if well-conducted, might always afford, a confused wild- 
ness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which 
every face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The 

^5 gentle Tranquilla informs us that she "had not passed the 
earlier part of life without tlie flattery of courtship, and the 
joys of triumph ; but had danced the round of gayety amidst 
the murmurs of envy and the gratulations of applause, had 
been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the 

2o sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by 
the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gayety of wit, and the 
timidity of love." Surely Sir John Falstaflf himself did not 



5. Sir Piercy Shafton. From Sir W. Scott's Monastery. 
Eupliuistic eloquence. Euphuism took its name from the Euphues 

of John Leyly, which appeared in 1578. It is an affected jargon, like that of 
the Hotel Rambouillet, which Moliere derided in his Frecieuses Ridicules. 
The schoolmaster Holofernes in Love's Labor's Lost is a Euphuist. 

Euphelia writes to the Rambler on the mischief of faction (No. 46), and 
on the misery of a modish lady in solitude. (No. 42.) 

6. lllioUocleia describes a young lady's impatience to see London. 
{Rambler, 62 ) 

7. Imlac, the poet. From Rasselas. 

Seged, Emperor of £thioi>ia. From Rambler. No. 204, 205. 
The history of ten day.s of Seged, etc. A Rasselas in miniature, the 
moral of the story being the vanity of the pursuit of pleasure. 

8. Cornelia. From Rambler, 51. 
15. Tranquilla. From Rambler, 119. 

22. Surely, Sir John Falstaft", etc. In The Merry Wives of Wiyidsor. 
Lord Macaulay himself in a note calls attention to the resemblance between 
this sentence and one in the Rambler ('No. 20), which we may here quote: 
" It is almost a general ambition of those who favor me with their advice for 
the regulation of my conduct, or their contribution for the assistance of ray 
understanding, to affect the style and names of ladies. And I cannot always 



LIFE OF JOHNSON. 51 

wear his petticoats with a worse grace. The rea(l(>r m.-iy well 
cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 
'omau has a great peard ; I spy a great peard under her 
muffler." 

We had something more to say. But our article is already 5 
too long ; and we must close it. We would fain part in good 
humor from the hero, from the biograplier, and even from the 
editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this 
claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Bos- 
well's book again. As we close it, the chib-room is before us, 10 
and the table on which stand the omelet for Nugent, and the 
lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which 
live forever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spec- 
tacles of Burke and the tall, thin form of Langton, the courtly 
sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon 15 
tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his 
ear. In the foreground is tliat strange figure which is as 
familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we hava| 
been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge, massy face, 
seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black 20 
worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched foretop, the 
dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see 
the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches ; we see 
the heavy form rolling ; we hear it puffing ; and then comes 
the " Why sir !" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, 25 
sir !" and the " You don't see your way through the question, 
sir !" 

What a singular destiny has been that of tliis remarkable 
man ! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours 
as a companion ! To receive from his contemporaries that 30 
full homage which men of genius have in general received 
only from posterity ! — To be more intimately known to pos- 
terity than other men are known to their contemporaries ! 



withhold some expression of anger, like Sir Hujjh in the comedy, when I 
happen to find that a woman has a beard. I must therefore warn the gentle 
Phyllis that she send me no more letters from the Horse Guards." 



52 LIFE OF JOHNSON. 

That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, 
in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writ- 
ings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day 
fading ; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless 
stable-talk, the memory of which he probably thonglit would 
die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the 
English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe. 



1 



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BY 

BRAINERD KELLOGG, A.M., 

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and " Sigher Lessons in English." 



In preparing this work upon Rhetoric, the author's aim has been to 
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Prest. of State Normal School, Oshkosh. 
Wis. 



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EDITED BY EMINENT ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOLARS, 

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17 



Byron's Prophecy of Dante. 

(Cantos I. and II.) 
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seroso. 
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III., and IV.) 
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Churchyard. 
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I.) 
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etc. (Selections.) 
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Julius Caesar. (Selections.) 
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Pope's Essay on Criticism. 
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I. and II.) 
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Milton's Comus. 
Tennyson's Enoch Arden, The 

Lotus Eaters, Ulysses, and 

Tithonus. 



(Selec- 
C arc I. 



31 Irving»s Sketch Book 

tions.) 
33 Dickens's Christmas 
(Condensed.) 

33 Carlyle's Hero as a Proplnit. 

34 Macaulay's Warren Hastings. 

(Condensed.) 

35 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake- 

field. (Condensed.) 

36 Tennyson's The Tvro Voices, 

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55 Pope's Rape of the Lock. 

56 Tennyson's Elaine. 

57 Tennyson's In Memoriam. - - 

58 Church's Story of the uEneid. 
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60 Swift's Gulliver's Voyage to 

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61 Macaulay's Essay on Lord Ba- 

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98 Edwin Arnold. (Selected Poems.) 

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